The burning issue of the continuing
incarceration of thousands of political prisoners in India, the bitter reality
behind the facade of the so-called largest democracy in the world, of a penal
state armed with the worst kinds of draconian laws is brought forth in sharp
relief in a press statement issued by Abhay, the spokesperson of the CPI
(Maoist) dated 11 May 2012. This statement was in response to the charges of the
Indian government of acts of ‘terror’ of the Maoists such as ‘abduction’ and
‘ransom’ and the express need of a National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC)
purportedly to deal with such ‘acts’.
The
statement while exposing the duplicity of Chidambaram (the then Home Minister)
squarely put him on the dock pointing out that he lacks any moral right to
charge the Maoists with ‘abduction’ when his government has put behind bars
thousands of adivasis. Refuting the Indian Home Minister’s charge of
‘abduction’, the Maoists argued that these persons were taken not for the
prospect of gaining money, nor for taking personal vendetta or revenge but was
‘arrested’ by the people for the release of thousands of adivasis incarcerated
in the jails of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and other states in India. It is
not ‘abduction’; it is ‘arrest’.
This
sums up the present state of growing impunity of the Indian State in the
subcontinent. The lawlessness of the Indian State and its institutions—the
judiciary, executive and the legislature vis-a-vis the toiling masses comes
forth in sharp relief in the above cited statement of the Maoist
spokesperson.
To
make sense of the growing impunity of the Indian State and its various
institutions it is important that we look into the basic nature of this state,
its beastly face of brutal repression, which forces the common people to take
recourse to different methods of self-defence that gets conveniently branded as
‘acts of terrorism’ by the powers that be with an obliging, sensation-driven
media, the so-called fourth estate. Thus the people fighting for justice
suddenly become ‘terrorists’ for the State. The pro-imperialist, Development
State that was ushered in, post-1947, in the Indian subcontinent has
systematically pushed these peoples to the margins so much so that their
survival is under peril. Every effort of the people to do away with this model
of development that replicates the exploitative, oppressive structures of
surplus maximisation of the local parasitic classes in alliance with imperialist
interests have been met with criminal profiling by the Indian State. So the
efforts of the Indian State to bring in more draconian laws as well as
centralized coordinated structures with enormous powers to tackle the increasing
discontentment of the masses of the people was spelt out by the Prime Minister
himself, albeit couched in the rhetoric of ‘development’.
‘Development’ as national security
Manmohan
Singh, the prime minister of India has already made it clear that with evident
signs of a perilously slow economy of the subcontinent—aggravated by the
tightening grip of imperialism riddled with the worst global economic crisis—all
aspects of development should henceforth be considered a national security
issue. Thus any dissent against the full fledged implementation of the
pro-imperialist policies of Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation will be
considered anti-development and hence ‘anti-national’, and also could be branded
as ‘seditious’. Significantly even before making this statement Mr. Manmohan
Singh had declared the Maoist movement as the ‘single largest internal security
threat’ to the Indian State.
Not a
single people’s movement in India today has escaped the criminal profiling of
the government, central or state, with many of its activists and leadership
being trumped up with numerous cases or are facing the danger of being killed in
the hands of the army/ police/paramilitary/vigilante gangs.
The historical demand for the right to be recognised as the
Political Prisoner
So
then who are the political prisoners? Tracing the history from the colonial
period till date, those who have stood up against injustice, oppression,
exploitation and discrimination, those who have dared to dream a world free of
all forms of exploitation and oppression, world based on sharing and
self-reliance have been the targets of the ire of the State—be it the colonial
one or the Post-47 Indian State which is servile to the imperialist interests.
From the days of Martyrs Bhagat Singh, Raj guru and Sukhdev and their fellow
comrades such as Jatin Das during anti-colonial struggle against the British
there has been the demand to be recognised as political prisoners. It is not
only revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh and his comrades but the Gandhians also
talked about the need for the recognition of the rights of the political
prisoner during the intervening period between the two world wars when the
anti-colonial struggle was also gaining momentum. All these anti-colonialists
were fighting for a future free from the yoke of colonialism and many like
Bhagat Singh had the vision for a self-reliant Indian subcontinent free from all
forms of exploitation and oppression. The raging storm of various national
liberation straggles in the subcontinent during the 1940s also saw the Colonial
State enacting various Preventive Detention as well as other repressive laws to
criminalise all such people’s aspirations. With the communal division of the
subcontinent and the formation of the brahminical Indian State in the image of
imperialism, the necessity to further criminalise any such aspirations was all
the more evident. From the Telangana Armed Struggle of the 1940s through the
Naxalbari in the 1970s and the national liberation struggles in the 1980s and
1990s through the growing tide of various people’s movements against the
increasing assault of the ruling classes pushing the policies of Liberalisation,
Privatisation and Globalisation (LPG) from 1991 till date along with the growing
spectre of the Maoist movement have all ensured that the definition of the
political prisoner keep expanding as an indicator of the multifarious expression
of the manifest discontent of the peoples of the subcontinent. In the 1970s when
the Emergency was declared by Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India
suspending all fundamental rights, apart from the Naxalite prisoners who
survived the hundreds of thousands of custodial and secret executions and had
been fighting for their rights as political prisoners, the liberals sections of
the Lohiate Socialists, Gandhians as well as the social democrats belonging to
the CPI also raised the question of the need to recognise the right of the
political prisoner.
The Penal Indian State—Legalisation of Growing
Impunity
As
the Brahminical Indian State was a consensus of the Post World War II
re-division of the world among the imperialist powers under the leadership of US
imperialism, the inherent nature of the State was Hindu communal. The process of
state building that ensued in Post-1947 India had this emergent sentiment as the
defining factor so much so in the beginning of the 21stCentury, when
the renewed imperialist offensive on the peoples of the world was unleashed
through the ideology of the so-called ‘war against terror’ Indian State became
an able ally of US imperialism in South Asia. The Muslim as the other, Kashmiri
Muslim as the traitor, other fighting nationalities as threat to the grand idea
of resurgent India, the Adivasi,
Dalit
and other oppressed castes as reasons for incompetence, inefficiency and
obstacles for the march ahead to ‘catch up’ with the West are Orientalist
stereotypes inherited in the ideological edifice of the Indian State. The
anti-Muslim, anti-Dalit, anti-minority nature of the Indian State has been
sharply foregrounded in the present phase with increasing atrocities on the
people.
Muslim
Youth: Target of Hate Politics Camouflaged in the Ideology of ‘War against
Terror’
Thousands
of Muslim youth have been the target of the so-called ‘war against terror’, many
of them being framed in several bomb blast cases such as the Samjhauta train
blast case, the Bangalore blast cases, Coimbatore blast case, Jaipur Blast case,
Hyderabad Blast cases, several blast cases in Delhi, Bombay, Surat in Gujarat,
Nashik, Nanded and Malegaon in Maharashtra, Blasts in Uttar Pradesh and attempts
at the same in several places in Kerala, the list is endless. The most striking
aspect of all these blast cases is that none of these cases could end up in the
conviction of any of the incarcerated Muslim youth. Rather all of them were
taken to custody, brutally tortured mentally and physically, many of the methods
indulged in by the investigating agencies even putting the much talked about Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo into oblivion.
The
Malegaon blast case is perfect illustrative example to bring forth the glaring
fact how Muslims have become easy cannon fodder for selling the ideology of the
so-called ‘war against terror’ as a conduit to facilitate increasing
intervention of the US imperialist forces in South Asia let alone the deepening
convergence of interest between moribund capital and the Hindu communal fascist
forces. Malegaon case in brief is as follows:
On 8
September 2006 a bomb explodes at the Hamidia Masjid and its premises in
Malegaon town. Within hours the Maharashtra police declared that it was the
proscribed Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) that was behind the blasts
triggering of a spree of arrests of Muslim youth. Though many didn’t buy the
story that in a Mosque Muslim youth have put the explosives the media and the
police created an atmosphere of terror and intrigue to the extent that for saner
voices to brave the motivated hyperbole and come forward was impossible.
Gradually the people of Malegaon mustered courage and they unitedly came forward
with their strong condemnation of the manner in which the whole incident was
used to put innocent Muslim youth behind bars. After 5 years of incarceration
due to increasing public pressure the State was forced to release on bail nine
of the accused as there was hardly any evidence and it was becoming increasingly
clear through the statements of Hindu communal elements that it was their
organisations which were behind such heinous acts. Further the doubts of the
people about the police version was grounded on various facts as the prime
accused in the blast Shabbir Massihullah was two months before the incident
arrested and put behind bars in another case. Another accused in the case Shahid
Ansari was the priest (Imam) of a Mosque in Yvatmal which was 520 km away from
the site of the incident. The people belonging to the Mosque in Yvatmal had
given witness that Shahid was at the Mosque presiding over the prayers on the
day when the blasts happened at Malegaon. Further Abrar Ahmad who had turned
approver later had told the court that he was offered money by the police to
turn approver. Along with all these developments was the incriminating findings
of Hemant Karkare the then Maharashtra ATS Chief about the extensive network of
Hindu Communal organisations involved in the various blasts. No wonder Hemant
Karkare was mysteriously killed in the much publicised attack on the Chhatrapati
Shivaji terminus (erstwhile Victoria terminus) and other places in Mumbai. The
case finally collapsed with the confession statement of Swamy Aseemananda
recorded before a magistrate about his as well as various networks of Hindu
communal, supremacist organisations involvement in the planting of bombs.
Despite all such incriminating findings the extent of communalisation of the
investigating agencies are so deep rooted that they are still harping on the old
disproven theories so as to find ways to rescue the Hindu communal elements who
have been arrested in the case. Thus despite being offered bail the fate of all
the 9 Muslim youth who got framed in the case is still uncertain.
There
are many such blast cases which have a similar story to tell. Notwithstanding
the facts and emptiness of the claims made by the investigating agencies, Muslim
youth still are easy targets for the politics of the so-called ‘war against
terror’ and to a considerable extent the State machinery has been successful in
spreading stereotypes about the Muslim community who are the poorest
economically, socially and educationally. Muslim youth from the states of
Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh,
Karnataka, Tamilnadu and Kerala have been framed in several blast cases. The
State of Gujarat under the fascist, communal Narendra Modi, the darling of the
imperialist and domestic comprador capital, have taken hate politics laced with
jingoism to new heights thus criminalizing and incarcerating the Muslim youth in
an unprecedented manner. The dubious links between the notorious Andhra Pradesh
Special Branch and the Gujarat police in manufacturing terror plots and cold
blooded murder in the name of ‘encounter killings’ have already been brazenly
pushed beneath the carpet as Narendra Modi and his henchmen have played patron
to the communalization and criminalization of the police and intelligence. The
genocide of Muslims in Gujarat let alone the framing up of Muslim youth in
various cases after the notorious Godhra train accident a livid memories in the
minds of every discernible mind as instances towards consolidating the Hindu
communal forces as the main plank of vote bank politics and hence capture and
maintenance of political power at the central and state level governments in the
India.
In
many of these cases the trials happen at snails’ pace with many a time the
judges of the respective courts getting transferred midway through the trial.
The imminent ‘threat’ of the Muslim ‘other’ is well subsumed in the politics of
the ban of Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). Several arrests of
alleged SIMI activists from various states have been publicized in the media
with many acts of ‘terror’ attributed to the SIMI. The arrested Muslim youth
have been slapped with numerous cases. But the fact remains that almost all the
cases either on the Muslim youth in particular or SIMI in general have collapsed
like nine pins without any shred of evidence. Despite such glaring facts the
Brahminical Indian State has persisted with the ban on SIMI. Another fiction of
the imminent ‘threat’ is the hyperbole campaign in the media about a so-called
organization called Indian Mujahideen. No one knows if such an organization
really exists. But several Muslim youth have been rounded up under the garb of
being members of that organization. In many a case the educated Muslim youth is
also a target of the Indian State. The politics of vilification of the Muslim
community around the bomb blasts as well as the threats of ‘terror’ attributed
to the community through the organizations like SIMI and Indian Mujahideen
needless to say with the stereotypes about the Muslims have made the average
Muslim a potential suspect in the non-Muslim psyche.
Kashmiri Muslims—the targets of occupation translated as
impunity
The
case of Dr. Qasim Muhammad Faktoo stands testimony to the brutal face of
political vendetta of the Indian State on the people of Jammu & Kashmir as
he is yet to see the light of the day being incarcerated for more than 20 years
in prison. Initially arrested and put under the Terrorists and Disruptive
Activities Act (TADA) the courts had later cleared him of the charges under TADA
and the police also had written to the authorities about the need to consider
the case against Dr. Qasim Muhammad Faktoo on its merits and his prolonged
incarceration without any charges. But as regards every political prisoner the
decision to put them behind bars or to release are political and true in Qasim
Faktoo’s case it has taken the toll of twenty years (almost two life terms) as
the powers that be still look at his case with political vendetta—a test case of
the Kashmiri Muslim being targeted for his political convictions. If twenty
years is not enough for the authorities to consider the release of Dr. Qasim
Muhammad Faktoo, for other Kashmiri Muslims it is not different.
For a
Kashmiri Muslim to spend as an undertrial for a life term in the jails in India
is not very uncommon. And like his/her Indian counterpart for a Kashmiri Muslim
to be implicated in the numerous blast cases that happen like mushrooms
sprouting, in the length and breadth of the subcontinent is a normal thing. To
arrest a Kashmiri Muslim for such cases is also common sense. The Lajpat Nagar
Blast case shows the growing impunity of the police and other investigative
agencies when it comes to framing Kashmiri Muslims. The blast took place on 21
May 1996 at the Lajpat Nagar market in New Delhi and of the six Kashmiri Muslims
arrested on this count Mirza Nissar Hussain, Mohd Ali Bhat and Mohd Naushad were
given death sentences by the trial court while Javed Ahmad Khan was given life
sentence and the other two Farooq Ahmad Khan and Farida Dar were given seven
years and four years two months under the Explosive Substances Act as well as
Arms Act which are standard charges slapped on the political prisoners belonging
to the National Liberation Struggle areas / Adivasis / Maoists. It took the
trial court fourteen years to conclude the trial and finally give the judgement.
So the undertrials had almost completed a life term awaiting the trial to
finish. Finally it took the Delhi High Court to slam the police and the
investigating agencies for not evening following the minimum procedures while
conducting the probe as well as apprehending the suspects. It was not the first
time that the higher courts in India had expressed its displeasure about the
flouting of vital norms and procedures by the investigating agencies and it was
not the first that the Higher Courts left it at that without taking any action
on the criminal intent of the authorities. Interestingly the court after making
a song and dance of the set pattern of increasing instances of impunity on the
side of the police and the investigating agencies then keeps a studied silence.
Till date there is hardly any case worth noting where the grave misconduct of
the police and the other investigating/intelligence agencies have been held
accountable by the court of law.
So
finally when the High Court of Delhi acquitted Mirza Nissar Hussain and Mohd Ali
Bhatt on the 22 November 2012 both of them had spent 16 years in prison—14 as
undertrials and the rest 2 years as convicts—waiting for the court finally to
dawn upon and say that they are innocent. Despite flimsy evidences the HC still
persisted with the life sentence of Javed Ahmad Khan while commuting the death
sentence of Mohd Naushad to life. There are thousands of such cases of tell tale
instances of impunity of the police, paramilitary and numerous investigating
agencies vying each other to show that they can deliver the results which can
add substance to the ideological propaganda of the ‘war against terror’.
As
mentioned before the edifice of the Indian State was built violently by
repressing the demands of Right to Self-Determination of the Peoples of Jammu
& Kashmir, Nagas, Manipuris, Mizos, Assamese, Bodos, Dimasa. Even the
demands for autonomy and separate statehood (internal federalism) within the
Indian union by the people of Telangana, Vidarbha etc. also meant with violent
repression from the State resulting in the death of thousands of people. Kashmir
especially has become the flashpoint in the geo-politics of South Asia. Both the
ruling classes of India and Pakistan would want Kashmir to remain as a
contentious issue in their competitive political gamesmanship to become the
reliable ally of US imperialism. India uses Kashmir to further entrench the
Brahminical Hindutva jingoism caricaturing the Kashmiri Muslim as a grave threat
to India’s sovereignty and integrity. This has made possible the Indian State’s
acts of impunity in Kashmir with close to 100,000 people being killed by the
Indian Army and paramilitary, more than 60,000 rotting in torture and detention
centres and around 10,000 subjected to enforced or involuntary disappearance
with the fate of many having been unearthed time and again from unidentified
graves. Apart from the prisons in J& K, Kashmiri Muslims have been put in
prisons in Ranchi, West Bengal, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra
etc. In many a case, trial goes on for more than 10 years (in some cases 14
years) for the court to finally declare the undertrial as innocent! As one of
the Kashmiri Muslim prisoner stated after being sentenced to death in a bomb
blast case in Delhi: ”Being a Kashmiri in itself is a crime in India”!
The
draconian Public Security Act of Jammu & Kashmir is a one of a kind law
amply used by the state to see to it that dissident voices remain behind bars
for years together. It is totally within the discretion of the army who holds
sway over the civil administration as to how many times a person can be put
behind bars using this draconian act. Easily once evoked this act can prevent a
person from seeing the light of the day for the next two years after which it is
again put before the court. Even when the civilian court of Jammu & Kashmir
orders the release of a particular prisoner the army court can often over rule
it.
Indian expansionism and the North East
If
the Indian State has converted Kashmir, one of the most beautiful places in the
world, into a graveyard, the situation in the entire region of the North East
has not been different. The principle approach of the Indian State in this
region has been to entrench itself as the main adjudicator of all the
outstanding disputes of the peoples in the region by pitting one nationality
against the other. Since 1947 the ‘carrot and stick’ policy of the Indian State
has ensured that it has its stranglehold over the destiny of the peoples in the
region. One of the main strategies for this has been to engage in prolonged
talks (peace talks/ceasefire) with various national liberation movements engaged
in armed resistance so as to wear them down politically and thus create
dissension within these communities and their liberation movements. The Indian
State could manage this with the Assamese, Mizos and the Bodos of the region
while at the same time engaging in the longest ever talks with the Nagas (15
years)—which is often termed in the security parlance as the ‘mother of all
insurgencies’. One of the main leaders involved directly in the negotiations
from the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (IM) Anthony Shimray was
kidnapped from a foreign country (Nepal) by the Indian intelligence services and
later shown as arrested from the state of Bihar by the RAW. The Indian
government has slapped the charges under UAPA and waging war on Anthony Shimray
who is one of the main leaders involved in the negotiation. No other case can
illustrate much better than this as to how authoritarian and fascist the Indian
State and its various arms can be. The Manipuris have been facing arrests as
well as fake encounter killings of their leadership and activists with the army
enjoying blanket powers under the AFSPA as mentioned above. In the last 5 years
alone more than 1500 cases of fake encounters have been reported from the valley
of Manipur of which the Supreme Court has just taken note of just half a dozen
killings. Thus in Manipur like in many parts of the subcontinent people’s
activists are mainly killed than being arrested and kept behind bars. Apart from
Manipur and Assam fake encounters or what the state conveniently describes as
‘firing in self-defence’ are quite common in areas where national liberation
struggles are raging such as Jammu & Kashmir, Naga areas, Bodoland, Kamtapur
strugglein North Bengal etc. In the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand,
Orissa, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh also the trend is rampant with Andhra Pradesh
leading and showing the way in acts of impunity. The mandatory guidelines set by
the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and other legal provisions are never
followed anywhere in such claims of encounter.
Assam
and Manipur has also faced rape and murder by the army and paramilitary as an
instrument of repression. The killing of Manorama Devi an activist of the
national liberation struggle in Manipur is a case which attracted the attention
of world-wide media. The novel protest of women stripping themselves before the
Indian army camps with placards asking the Indian army to rape them shows the
extent of brutality and impunity to which the Indian State has descended to
while dealing with movements with clear political aspirations of the peoples in
the region. This is despite massive protests from the people’s movements and the
civil and democratic rights organisations. Assam also has been witness to
numerous fake encounter killings of democratic rights activists of the MASS
along with the fake encounters of ULFA (United Liberation Front of Asom)
activists and Maoists in the region. Several youth fighting for their basic
needs in the extremely backward regions of Upper Assam has also been put behind
bars.
Besides,
the entire NE is rising up against the new colonial project of development being
pushed by the Indian State euphemistically called as the Look East Policy (LEP).
As per the LEP the Indian State is planning to build a whopping 168 dams in the
entire NE to produce a massive 100,000 MW of power which will be sold mostly to
the international market through the Free Trade Zones being planned in the
Burmese border. All anti-dam, anti-displacement movements in the region is being
penalised by the State through the instruments of UAPA. The regions of Assam and
Arunachal Pradesh have been facing severe repression on peoples’ movements
against displacement. The prisons conditions in Arunachal Pradesh are worst in
the world with hardly any proper shelter as well as food for the prisoners. It
goes without saying many of the prisoners in this region are national liberation
fighters or tribals unable to cope with the enforcement of laws on their
everyday life in the forested hill tracts.
Prisons in India—overcrowded, unhygienic and abysmal living
conditions
As
the graph of discontentment among the masses of the people is threatening to
shoot over the roof, prisons in the Indian subcontinent are getting overcrowded
with the living conditions being abysmal. In December 2012 the inmates lodged in
the crowded prisons of Gadchhiroli in Maharashtra went on a hunger strike
demanding the authorities to shift them to the newly constructed prison with
more amenities. Despite the new prison being constructed the authorities
deliberately delayed the shifting of the prisoners from their present jail which
had fewer amenities and crowded with prisoners which is the common feature of
prisons in India. Overcrowded with inmates and unimaginably unhygienic from the
prisons in India several diseases are reported due to food and water
contamination as well as bad sanitation with clogged toilets and bathrooms.
There is hardly any recreational facility for the prisoners. For a prisoner to
get timely and competent medical care he/she will have to wait for days. Bad
diet, inhuman, totally unhygienic living conditions, torture and humiliation in
various forms are what these prisoners face day in and day out. Long years of
captivity have made many of them victims of psychological trauma, physical
degeneration, mental breakdown and derangement. Some prisoners have already died
unnatural deaths in prisons, some died after being released on bail, The legal
process is also very long, frustrating and very much expensive and often
unbearable.
The
case of Swapan Dasgupta, editor of People’s March in Bangla and Publisher of
Radical Publications, is of serious concern for anyone fighting for the rights
of the prisoners. He was diagnosed of cancer in the prison. Being a Maoist
political prisoner the authorities saw to it that his treatment be delayed to
the last moment. Even after he was shifted to the hospital at a critical stage
after many protests from the civil and democratic rights sections of West Bengal
the medical prescriptions of the doctor treating him were ignored and kept
beneath his bed by the police officers in duty at his hospital bed. Only towards
the fag end could his comrades reach out to him to realize what was done to him.
This was nothing but custodial killing in cold blood. Another case that needs
mention is the struggle for life from death of Shushil Roy, senior Maoist leader
(aged 76) who was kept in the Giridih prison in Jharkhand for 8 months with just
pain killers after he reported to the jail doctor about blood in his urine as
well as excruciating pain in lower abdomen. Finally when he was shifted to the
Rajendra Prasad Institute of Medical Sciences in Bokaro there too like Swapan
Dasgupta he was left unattended in the ward for prisoners as the police watched
him floating on stools and urine for days in a semi-conscious state. The
catheter which was inserted to ease the flow of urine got clogged as there was
no one to periodically clean it thus choking flow totally damaging one kidney
while partially destroying the other. Only the dogged efforts of the CRPP along
with his brother could salvage his life back and his conditional release after
prolonged treatment at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) where
he got his cancerous tumour and urinary bladder removed to survive precariously
with one partially damaged kidney. If such senior leaders of the Maoist movement
are treated deliberately with vendetta in such a way to ensure their death in
custody one can imagine the condition of the poor adivasi and dalit arrested
from the areas of intense struggle of the people for their lives and
livelihoods.
The Naxalite/Maoist prisoner or the single largest internal
security threat
The
1970s were abound with the stories of torture, disappearance and custodial
deaths of thousands of Naxalite prisoners. Especially in the State of West
Bengal, while UP, Bihar, Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala also reporting
cases of a similar albeit in lesser numbers. The methods of specific targeting
of the Naxalite prisoner in terms of isolation, torture—psychological as well as
physical—surrender policy and in many cases death due to prolonged incarceration
that were reported in the 1970s and early 80s are still the case as about 25000
Adivasis from the States of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Jangal Mahal in
West Bengal abound the prisons. Apart from the Adivasis, the profile of the
Maoist prisoner encompasses the other oppressed castes, sections of the educated
middle class etc. As mentioned in the case of Sushil Roy and Swapan Dasgupta the
leadership is specifically targeted with numerous cases in different states
slapped against them. Senior Maoist leaders like Pramod Mishra, Amitabh Bagchi,
Narayan Sanyal, Tushar Bhattacharyya, Kobad Ghandy, Jhandu Mukherjee, PP Singh,
most of them above their sixties with Narayan Sanyal being the eldest at 77
despite being directives by the Supreme Court of India to speed up the trial of
senior citizens there is hardly any progress in the cases filed against these
leaders. Narayan Sanyal who was about to be get bail in all the cases in
Jharkhand and was about to be shifted to Andhra Pradesh was prevented by the
Jharkhand police by putting him under the NSA thus preventing any possibility of
getting bail in the remaining cases in AP at least for another year. Most of the
cases that are put on the leadership are solely based on third party
confessions. Since the alleged confession made by a particular prisoner has the
names of all the CCMs included as and when a Central Committee member is
arrested he/she becomes automatically accused in such numerous cases spread in
various states thus making their release almost impossible.
As
has been discussed in the case of political prisoners belonging to the Muslim
community and national liberation struggles the manufacturing of evidence by the
police and investigating agencies flouting all norms and procedures go unabated
in the case of the Naxalite/Maoist prisoner too. The premises of the
detained/arrested are searched without the presence of independent witnesses, no
seizure lists are handed over to the members of the families, and, in certain
cases, some literature or articles are implanted without conducting any search.
Fake seizure lists are later submitted to implicate the person in criminal
cases. In fact, works of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, biography of
Shaheed Bhagat Singh adorn almost all seizure lists. Even those of Romain
Rolland or any liberal Indian author such as Manik Bandyopadhyay are not
spared.
Once
given bail or acquitted in cases then they are virtually kidnapped at the time
of their release by police with new warrants from other districts or states. The
case of Arun Ferreira from Mumbai who got acquitted in all the 10 cases and was
to be released from Nagpur is the best example as he was kidnapped and his
lawyer was manhandled by the police to be produced later in Gadchhiroli. Another
striking example is that of Padma a Maoist prisoner who after getting bail was
never produced before the court and instead was shown later, after her lawyer
filed a habeas corpus, as being taken to another prison for a new case slapped
on her under the jurisdiction of a new court in the State of Chhattisgarh. Padma
was denied treatment several times when she was suffering from severe malaria
and many a time the prisoner had to resort to hunger strike to even get medical
attention. The State of Chhattisgarh has gained notoriety for not producing many
of the women Naxalite/Maoist prisoners in the court for several hearings
together. The reasons often cited are lame security threats. Women have
frequently been subjected to sexual abuse and molestation during raids and while
in custody. As in the case of the experience of women in regions of national
liberation struggles, there are cases reported in Jangalmahal regions of West
Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, etc., of women being
forced to strip on the road by the raiding police party/paramilitary ostensibly
to determine their sex. Many instances of allegations of large-scale abuse and
rape were established in various investigations by government and nongovernment
fact-finding missions and medical teams.
The
Bhagalpur jail in Bihar and Nagpur jail in Maharashtra are equipped with special
egg shaped cells (anda cell) to isolate the political prisoner, especially the
Naxalite prisoner for days.
Even
before the Naxalite prisoner reaches the prison while being detained, the set
pattern is to not produce before the court within the stipulated 24 hours. They
are kept illegally at police stations and detention centres (read torture
centres) sometimes for days together. Most of them are brutalised in these
centres through severe torture. The majority of the Maoist prisoners belonging
to the district, regional, zonal, central committee rank are often kept in
illegal confinement for days. If the leadership is from Andhra Pradesh then
there is every chance that they may get killed in fake encounters. The recent
killings of Kishenji, Azad, Sudhakhar Reddy, Appa Rao all point consistently to
this tactic of the Indian State.
Several
newspaper reports and testimonies given by those released on bail show clearly
as to how they had been subjected to physical and mental torture for hours and
days together. Continuous interrogation even for 18 hours a day for days
together, keeping prisoners blindfolded even when he or she goes to the toilet,
application of electric shocks on private parts of the body, beating up with
batons, kicking them with heavy boots, beating them with fists, standing on all
parts of the body of the arrested persons, spitting on the face, breaking down
fingers by pressing them in the opposite direction, by pressing pins and nails
beneath the toes,
There
are also instances of entire villages in Chandrapur and Gadchhiroli being lifted
and slapped with cases under UAPA. The concerted effort of the lawyers saw the
entire village getting acquitted. But this did not prevent the authorities from
further implicating the villagers in other cases, the vengeful attitude being
attributed to the sole reason of the unrepentant villagers being ardent Maoist
supporters.
In
many of the cases on the villagers if the son/daughter/brother/sister/father are
in the wanted list of the police or paramilitary then someone from the family is
taken away in the place of the person who has been declared absconding. There
are numerous cases of this nature almost in all areas of the subcontinent,
primarily in the adivasi areas.
As
part of the further criminalisation of the lives of Adivasis, the State of
Chhattisgarh has declared unlawful for the Adivasis to carry their traditional
weapons. Already criminalised under various laws, the direct fallout is that a
large number of these adivasis are being implicated in serious cases. Thousands
of ordinary villagers are routinely picked up during search operations,
incarcerated with impunity by security personnel having scant regard for legal
procedure. Most of them implicated under ”Naxal Offence” are not produced in the
courts for long periods of time, on the pretext of non-availability of
”sufficient police guards”. Hence the trial does not proceed for years together.
Out of economic difficulty and for fear of harassment, family members of the
under-trials are unable to visit them in jail thus making them even more
vulnerable. The adivasi ”Naxal undertrials” are only kept in Central Jails. In
many cases in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Jungal Mahal they are put in far away
jails with maximum security so much so that their regular production in court
becomes impossible. In these regions, the prisoners have petitioned the higher
courts, all of which proved to be futile. Most of the adivasi under-trials are
dependent on government legal-aid-lawyers who more often than not never go to
meet the client or seek instructions regarding the case. Often they are amenable
to pressures from the police or prosecution. Seldom do the courts have official
interpreters/ translators to enable the adivasi communicate in their own
language.
Even
in a scenario when they manage to get bail there are hundreds of thousands of
dalits and Adivasis who are unable to pay the bail bond—which usually comes to
Rs.500-2000—thus condemned to stay in the prison for another six months or a
year. In the meantime there is every possibility that they get implicated in
another case by the police who would want to fill up their ledgers with the
maximum arrests under UAPA or similar such offences so as to beef up their
career!
Death Penalty as an Instrument of Retribution
As
this is being written the Indian State is hurriedly executing a series of cases
of capital punishment that were pending before the President of India with the
latter rejecting many of the appeals for clemency. The case that has shocked
every democratic mind in the Indian subcontinent is the secret execution of
Mohd. Afzal Guru. The Supreme Court of India had cleared Afzal of all charges of
being a part of a ‘terrorist’ organisation in the Parliament Attack Case
December 2001. The court had accepted the fact that there was only
circumstantial evidence against him. But then the SC upheld the death penalty of
Afzal Guru on the strange grounds of satisfying the ‘collective conscience’!
Further the State violated every procedure once the clemency petition was
rejected by the President of India as they secretly implemented the order of
execution of Afzal without informing his family about the final developments.
This was mandatory for any country that talked about the rule of law and the
need to uphold procedures. On the contrary one could hear the Home Minister
gloating before the media the decision to carry forward the execution secretly
as in his wisdom the government didn’t want Afzal’s family to take recourse to
other remedies provided by the law as well as the jail manual! Later the Supreme
Court of India while staying the death sentence on seven others in the month of
April had accepted the need to follow all procedures pertaining to the rights of
the family members of the person on death row so that all possible legal as well
as semi-legal provisions available can be exhausted. Soon after the ‘secret’
execution of Mohd. Afzal Guru the Supreme Court has dismissed the petition of
Davinder Pal Singh Bhullar for commuting the death sentence to life due to the
inordinate delay in the execution which in any case should be considered as
added cruelty to someone on death row. In all these instances the lame pretext
of continuing with capital punishment as to be exercised only in the ‘rarest of
rare’ instance have fallen flat with the records showing that the Indian Courts
have been awarding death penalties at the rate of 133 per year over the last ten
years. Thus the rarest of the rare cases are decided by the Indian courts once
in every three days! Most of the people who have been given death penalty either
belong to the Kashmiri Muslims or Muslims in general as well as the Dalits and
other oppressed sections who are basically the landless agricultural
labourers.
The role of the media
The
devious yet mediating role played by the media in this regard becomes
significant. In the Post 1947 Indian subcontinent, as is evident from the
trajectory of state building with the end of the World War II, the retention of
draconian laws of colonial vintage and its continuous evocation in all areas
that was against the consensus of formation of the Indian state is reflective of
the constant sense of insecurity of the Indian ruling classes. The state or
sense of emergency and hence the refuge in the extra-ordinary laws (draconian
laws) to address state building as a continuation of the imperialist logic in
other words is also addressing the context at hand as extra-ordinary. This sense
of the extra-ordinary situation as an imminent ‘threat’ from the neighbor State
Pakistan as well as from the national liberation sentiments in the North East
and Kashmir has further broadened with the deepening crisis in the subcontinent
to encompass the teeming millions of toiling Adivasis and dalits in the form of
the Maoist movement. The ideology of the ‘extra-ordinary’ in that sense has been
couched in very many populist slogans which today being rehashed as the ideology
of the politics of ‘development’. Thus in maintaining the credibility of logic
of the sense/notion of emergency as is evident in the letter and spirit of the
extra-ordinary laws (internal security) and the sanctity of criminalization of
all forms of dissent has been worked out through the ideological offensive
unleashed through the media.
It is
also important to note how the state mediates consent towards the ‘perceived
threat’ to national security through all these arrests. It is through the media
that the State articulates the ways of perceiving these arrests of political
dissidents. Here the profiling of this ‘perceived threatV’threat’ to national
security in the media also critically manufacture a perception of the ‘threat’
among the public. The definition of ‘national security’ also accommodates the
composition of the arrested individuals thus subtly enhancing the premise while
simultaneously demarcating the periphery of the very definition of concept of
national security among the public. Often common sense also equates the
seriousness of an issue/concern/intervention of the state by the amount of money
spend on it. As is evident the expenditure on surveillance, defence and
procurement of arms by the state have seen astronomical rise in the Indian
State’s exchequer. Without doubt the impact of such internal security
legislations on the assumptions of justice among the opinionated middle class
has also changed.
The
explosion of media trials of the arrested individuals even before the trial
begins in the court of law and the relative indifference of the media to the
actual proceedings in the court often stereotypes a certain profile of the
arrested individual that reinforces the narratives of ‘perceived threats’/
‘threats’ which often surmounts the reportage in the media. It is this
reinforcement of the perception which sediments as residual memories in the
public mind which often obfuscates an informed opinion of the individual in
deciding what constitutes a real threat to the people and their well being. The
role of the media as part of the process of consent building is to further
mystify the reality before the people. Here is the convergence of the draconian
law in UAPA and the mystifying role played by the media. The sanctity as well as
authenticity of both rests in the fact that perception is reality and not vice
versa. The more mystified the reality the more it becomes the perception and
hence reality itself. With imperialist and comprador capital investing heavily
in the media, the normalization of the process of growing impunity of the State
machinery and the culture of fear of the unknown due to the mystification of
perception has resulted in the growth of cynicism, rampant religiosity and
servility among the vast sections of the people paving the way for a lawless
State.
The
gradual build up of the Indian subcontinent towards a national security state
teethed with the worst ever draconian laws and other instruments to trample the
right to freedom of association, right to freedom of expression, right to
protest/dissent has been mediated through the fourth estate as an ideological
offensive, sophisticated in form, yet retrogressive in content by ways of
mystification of the present rooted in the prism of a mystified past so as to
make way for a mystified future where every value and sensibility is
measured/understood/appreciated by the presence or absence of the amount of
capital in it.
NCTC-NIA-UAPA-AFSPA—towards a national security state in the
subcontinent
The
desperate measures of the war-hawk representatives of the Indian State—unable to
contain the groundswell of the anger of the masses of the people as well as the
increasing disunity among its own ranks which they would euphemistically call as
a ”policy paralysis”—pushing for one repressive central agency as the need of
the hour to deal with anti-government ‘terrorist’ activities taking place in
parts of the Indian subcontinent have the central cabinet committee dealing with
security-related issues give nod to the formation of National Counter-Terrorism
Centre (NCTC) as early as on 11 January 2012. The NCTC will have three separate
departments—the first for collecting relevant data; the second the analysis
wing; and the third for taking repressive steps against the people who they will
brand as ‘terrorists’. This proposed NCTC will be under the control of the
central intelligence agency though there is still a lot of noise created against
that proposition. With the main office at the IB (Intelligence Bureau)
headquarters in New Delhi the NCTC will be headed by the additional director of
the IB department. It implies that the central intelligence branch will be in
control. Since there is no consensus among the ruling class parties vis-a-vis
the concentration of power in the NCTC making heavy weather of the already
namesake federalism of the Indian union, the setting up of the NCTC has been
halted though there are efforts, after the recent Hyderabad blasts, to
reintroduce it through the back door as is claimed in a ‘diluted’
form.
Before
the setting up of the NCTC the precursor to it was unveiled before the people of
the subcontinent through yet another draconian instrument, the National
Investigation Agency (NIA) Act in November 2008. The NIA has been created to
deal with ‘terrorist attacks…in the militancy and insurgency affected areas and
areas affected by Left Wing Extremism’ as also ‘terrorist attacks and bomb
attacks’, a large part of which are ‘found to have complex inter-State and
international linkages…’ claims the website of the same.
Legalization of Impunity—Criminalization of Law
This
NIA has, as its targets, ‘terrorists’ (a loaded term which is so elastic for the
ruling classes to bring any form of dissent under its rubric and more liberally
used against the Muslim community), militants and insurgents (mainly people
fighting for their Right to Self-Determination such as the Kashmiris, Manipuris,
Nagas, Assamese and others) and the ”Left-Wing Extremists” (i.e., the Maoists).
These are the forces which the central government treats as forces threatening
the present set-up. The UAPA, NIA, NCTC are all integral parts of the same long
chain that openly tramples people’s rights and their fight for justice.
What
in essence the NIA does is to legalise all acts of impunity so far indulged in
by the police and paramilitary under the garb of fighting terror. For instance
the recent kidnapping of student leaders from Chandigarh in Punjab by the AP
Special Intelligence Branch and after 6 days of illegal custody the arrest was
shown in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Later it was revealed that even
before the NIA has been declared as fully operational there is already its
office functional with separate departments at NOIDA in the outskirts of Delhi.
And as the debate on NCTC is yet inconclusive the formation of which will
actually put in motion the functioning of the NIA, all former wings of the
intelligence from various ‘disturbed’ areas have been made functional under its
umbrella with the AP police (notorious for the acts of terror on the people’s
movements and its leadership) leading such illegal acts. The growing evidence is
that the NCTC and NIA will soon legalise all mafia-type operations of the
states’ police and paramilitary as is the case with the vigilante gangs.
Further,
P. Chidambaram when he was the Home Minister also took initiative to introduce
the Border Security Forces (BSF) (Amended) Bill to extend the right of operation
from the border areas to all parts of the Indian subcontinent.
Draconian Laws
Ever
since the end of World War II and the transfer of power in the Indian
subcontinent to the domestic parasitic ruling classes the legitimacy /
authenticity of rule over the people was maintained, albeit with other slogans
of populism, by taking refuge in enacting one draconian law after another in the
process denying many of the basic rights of the people that the Indian
constitution professes to uphold. It is no coincidence that of the 395 Articles
of the Indian constitution adopted in 1949 almost 250 articles were taken more
or less verbatim from the colonial Government of India Act of 1935. It is
important to have a quick look into those acts for our understanding of the
nature of Indian ‘democracy’. All the Press and Security Acts of the colonial
days remain unchanged under the New Constitution. The old repressive machinery
of the colonial state with its Indian Penal Code, Criminal Procedure Code, the
Police Act of 1861, Defence of India Rules, Preventive Detention Acts were
retained. The notorious Land Acquisition Act of 1894 which empowers the central
and state governments of supposedly independent India to acquire land by
advancing the pretext of ‘eminent domain’, ‘public purpose’ etc., and many other
such acts were perfected over the years by the ruling classes so as to continue
the attacks on the liberty of the people as a necessity to maintain their
legitimacy and authority.
The
Armed Forces Special Powers Ordinance imposed by the British colonial government
on 15 August, 1942, was injected with more teeth in 1958 when the Government of
India enacted the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA). It extended ”to the
whole of the States of Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura and the
Union Territories of Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram” which is otherwise called
today as the North East. Later, it was extended to Kashmir. The AFSPA empowered
the armed forces to kill anyone with impunity on mere suspicion that the person
was going to commit certain offence. Section 4 clause (c) of the act as amended
in 1972 read as follows: ” arrest without warrant, any person who has committed
a cognizable offence or against whom a reasonable suspicion exist that he has
committed or is about to commit a cognizable offence and may use such force as
may be necessary to effect the arrest”. It means that any person can be arrested
not for the commission of any ‘offence’, but for an ‘offence’ which in the
opinion of the law-enforcing authority the person may commit in future unless he
is prevented from doing so. Thus under this ”lawless law” a person can be
detained and put behind bars for an indefinite period of time without the
commission of any ‘offence’ at all. These lawless laws, needless to state, were
passed to curb the growing resistance of the people. The Preventive Detention
Act of 1950 was copied verbatim in the Maintenance of Internal Security Act
(MISA) 1971 under which tens of thousands of people were imprisoned between 1970
and 1973 in West Bengal alone, of which the overwhelming majority comprised the
Naxalites. During and before Emergency (1975-77), thousands of people—mostly
Naxalites—were shot dead or made to disappear. By the end of the Emergency MISA
had become the most hated word. And hence the MISA was ipso facto copied into
the National Security Act (NSA) 1980!
In
fact, there is no end to such draconian acts which had both regional and
sub-continental applications. The West Bengal Prevention of Violent Activities
Act, Punjab Disturbed Areas Ordinance, the National Security Act (1980), TADA
(1985), POTA, Public Security Act in Kashmir and many other acts and ordinances
were passed.
UAPA—the Extraordinary has become Ordinary; Perception has
become Reality
Every
succeeding ”lawless law” is a greater attack on the liberties of the people than
the previous one. Many of the acts are reflective of the growing unrest among
the oppressed nationalities, Adivasis, dalits, minorities, peasantry, working
class, students etc. The latest addition to this long list of draconian laws is
the Unlawful Activities Prevention (Amended) Act of 2008 which is tied up with
the charges of sedition hardly giving any scope for the mirage of a fair trial
in the court of lav/. The contradicting stands taken by the State vis-a-vis its
response to the growing unrest of the people against draconian laws in
particular was apparent as in September 2004 the President of India introduced
two ordinances in Indian
Parliament—one
to repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) and the other to bring in the
same old provisions in the repealed act under a new label, the Unlawful
Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). The paradox was so telling as the new Act was
more draconian than the previous one! As discussed in the case of the Armed
Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in the UAPA too mere suspicion of assumption
of a person capable of committing what is termed as a ‘terrorist’ act is
sufficient to put him/her behind bars. For any law supposedly to fight terrorism
the examining principle should have been that counterterrorism measures should
not facilitate, or have the potential, either implicit or intentional, for state
terrorism. ‘Terrorist activity’ is defined (Section 15) as ”any act with intent
to threaten or likely to threaten” the ”unity, integrity, security or
sovereignty of India or with intent to strike terror or likely to strike terror
in the people or any section of the people in India or in any foreign country…”.
Thus it has been left to the imagination of the authorities to define intention
as the question of intention has attained centrality in making UAPA [Amended]
(2008) one of the worst draconian laws.
According
to the UAPA, anyone can be kept in police or jail custody for 180 days without
trial, unlike normal laws which makes it 90 days, failing which the prisoner
will be granted bail. During this period, the detained can be brought to the
police station for questioning for as many times as the police officials think
necessary. It is very difficult to get release on bail under this Act.
There
are many more stringent clauses in the UAPA which makes it the worst draconian
Act so far. This will be dealt with later.
The
UAPA like all such laws which were enacted to counter political dissent, was
brought in 1967 to curb the ongoing National Liberation Struggle of the Nagas.
While the Act was applied uniformly in all other regions, it was extended to
Jammu & Kashmir on 1 September 1969, through the Constitution (Application
to Jammu & Kashmir) Amendment Order, 1969, by the Central Government. The
1967 Act, identified unlawful activity and organizations, in particular the
procedure for banning organizations, as unlawful.
India’s
ordinary law is tougher than UK and US anti-terror laws. Even under the
draconian Acts of TADA and POTA there were at least provisions for review to
ensure that the ‘extraordinary’ in the law does not metamorphose into the
ordinary in its implementation. It is founded on the principle that everyone is
suspicious or a suspect, with no fine distinction between the two. What is being
created is a suspicious state to empower suspicious officials and citizenry to
act suspiciously against any supposed suspect.
Significantly
more than ever before perceived ‘threat’ has been getting prime concern in
declaring criminality of the act of an individual/group/organization than the
exactitude of the Act itself. Perceived reality has become sacrosanct under this
law than the reality itself.
Thus
on the one hand when there is a major opposition against the AFSPA brewing up
from the opinionated section the fact remains that with the introduction of the
NCTC, NIA and the full fledged unleashing of the UAPA on the masses of the
people, the Indian subcontinent will be under an undeclared emergency throughout
the day, month, year. The government claims that these extraordinary laws aire
the products as well as response to ‘extraordinary’ situations. But under the
UAPA (Amended) 2008 the ‘extraordinary’ has been rendered ‘ordinary’. The
temporary has attained permanence without any provisions for review.
The
NCTC, in reality, is the product of Indo-American collaboration. People are more
and more becoming conscious of the fact that issues relating to India’s
‘internal security’ are being pursued under the dictates of US imperialists. The
NTPC is fascist, anti-people and draconian in nature; it is meant to suppress
people’s just struggles, nip them in the bud, to drown people’s movements in
blood so as to perpetrate the central policy of plunder of people’s natural
resources and wealth let alone causing devastation. For a long time since 1947,
new East India Companies have been allowed their foothold in the subcontinent by
the central and state governments—irrespective of their colour and they are
doing havoc to the land, environment, adivasis, dalits, workers, poor people,
petty bourgeois and broad sections of the people. It is the demand not just for
the sake of civil and democratic rights or human rights; it has now become an
issue of life and death for the people.
In
2005, the New Framework Agreement for US-India Defence Relationship was signed.
It was followed by the signing of the 123 Nuclear Agreement. In fact, the NCTC
has been set up under the dictates and guidance of the American imperialists so
that America could get legitimacy to carry on its terroristic acts in the Indian
subcontinent. The objective of the ”anti-terrorist policy” of America is to
create a structure that would collect information, carry on covert operations,
use of non-state actors, use drones to deal with anti-American forces that they
use with impunity against the fighting people all over the world; and in all
these operations, the Indian intelligence agencies and security forces would act
hand in glove with US security agencies.
The
present situation drives home the reality that the undeclared war waged by the
Indian central government against the people of the subcontinent in many parts
of India in the name of ‘Operation Green-hunt’ is fully backed, led by the
American agencies from behind the scenes. The extent and depth of this
involvement is evident if we go through the US Defence and intelligence services
documents about counterinsurgency interventions/operations outside its own
territories. One can see the blueprint of Operation Green Hunt in these
documents. Joint military exercises with American troops in the jungles of
Mizoram, procurement of sophisticated weapons and UAVs from Israel and their use
in areas of people’s struggles—all these point to that direction.
To
conclude, the rough estimate of the Adivasis that have been incarcerated for
daring to stand against the dog-eat-dog policies of the Indian State has touched
not less than 25000. A huge number of dalits (some estimates put it at closer to
200,000) are put under various sections right from petty theft to cases of frame
ups due to political reasons as a vast section of the dalits are landless
agricultural labourers as well as the lumpen proletariat. The labour of the
Dalit provides the cheap source of surplus maximization for the feudal
landowning sections and this exploitative relation is enforced through further
criminalisation of the Dalit community. The vast sections of the Muslim
community who have been incarcerated as part of the so-called war against terror
under several bomb blast cases and other cases of being part of ‘terror
networks’ or ‘terrorist organisations’ run into thousands. Most of the artisanal
class of which a major chunk is from the Muslim community are facing starvation
due to lack of opportunities and their growing resentment also gets criminalised
under the ideology of the war against terror in a brahminical Indian state. The
newly educated sections within the Muslim community are also easy targets of the
politics of ‘war against terror’. Thousands of Kashmiri Muslims are put behind
bars in response to the persistent demand of the people of Jammu & Kashmir
for their Right to S elf-Determination. It is ‘normal’ for anyone to suspect the
Kashmiri Muslim as a threat to the ‘integrity’ of India. The spectre of the
world economic crisis which is having its fault lines in South Asia with
increasing disparities between the rural and the urban, between traditional
agriculture and industry, between capital intensive big industry and
small-medium industries, between regions of concentration of capital and regions
with near or total absence of capital, between the rich and the poor, between
the upper caste and oppressed castes, between oppressed nationalities and the
comprador Indian big bourgeoisie, between the people and feudalism and
imperialism, the profile of the political prisoner as the target of the
exploitative State for his/her actions and convictions that are not for their
personal gain but directly or indirectly for the greater common good has become
more nuanced and complex very much intertwined with the struggle for civil and
democratic rights as well as the struggle to do away with the basis for all such
inequalities and exploitation. The need of the hour is to build a world-wide
consolidation of all peoples struggles that will unitedly fight for the release
of all political prisoners unconditionally, irrespective of their political and
ideological convictions.
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Revolution in South Asia - USA
http://southasiarev.wordpress.com/
Communist Party of India (Marxist - Leninist) NAXALBARI
http://www.thenaxalbari.blogspot.co.uk/
Ceylon Communist Party (Maoist)
http://www.bannedthought.net/SriLanka/index.htm
Indian Revolution
http://www.bannedthought.net/
* Communist Party of India (MAOIST)
Indian Vanguard - blog
http://indianvanguard.wordpress.com/
WPRM
Web: http://www.wprmbritain.org
REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY (CANADA)
http://www.pcr-rcp.ca
http://www.lionesto.net/
Italian section:
Maoist Communist Party Of Italy
http://www.prolcom.altervista.org and
http://proletaricomunisti.blogspot.com/
http://proletaricomunisti.blogspot.co.uk/
Guerre Popolari (People's War)
http://www.prolcom.altervista.org/guerre%20popolari.htm
Maoist Communist Party of Italy led - Red Block Youth blog
http://www.redblock-it.blogspot.com
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/index.htm
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/index.htm
COMMUNIST PARTY OF IRAN(MARXIST_LENINIST_MAOIST)
http://www.sarbedaran.org/ Farsi
http://www.sarbedaran.org/language/index.htm English
Communist(Maoist)Party of Afghanistan (English)
http://www.sholajawid.org/
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